Loss of Me
by Skylark Starflower
Summary: Being an author and artist, I know how attached people can get to their characters. How would you feel to find out they were gone forever?


Author's Note/Disclaimer: I don't own Project .hack; it belongs to CyberConnect2 and…well, Bandai Namco now. And that makes me sad. But never mind that.

I hope this fic doesn't come off as cheesy as my last .hack fic did. Tee hee. Anyway, this fic is based off two things, the .hack//Another Birth book series and .hack//G.U. You'll have to forgive any errors I may make, since I haven't finished playing G.U, (though that shouldn't be much of a problem, since it's not about any of the characters from that game, just an incident) or reading Another Birth since volume four doesn't seem to be available yet. Also, I really have a hard time figuring Legend of the Twilight into the main storyline. I don't know why, but both the manga and anime just raise far too many questions for me to be able to take either as canon, so I tend to ignore them when it comes to fics. And yeah, I borrowed the title from a FF IX song. It just seemed to work. Tee hee.

Being an author and artist, I know how attached people can get to their characters. How would you feel to find out they were gone forever?

"**.hack// Loss Of Me"  
****By Skylark Starflower  
****Written February 27, 2007**

Akira couldn't look away from the screen, the TV playing back endless scenes of the fire ravaged building. Several fire trucks continued to pump gallons of water on the blaze, to seemingly no avail. Thick black smoke curled away off screen.

"This can't be happening," she whispered. It had never occurred to her before to ever think that something like this could happen. It just didn't seem possible, and yet here she sat, watching the newsreel outlining the details, or at least what details were known.

It seemed that there had been some kind of spark in the system at the CC Corp. building and before anyone knew it, the whole building was up in flames. She didn't yet know what this meant for The World, but she was beyond sure that it couldn't be good.

She felt sick. The World may have just been a game to most of the 20 million or so people who played it, but she and a small handful of others knew full well that it had been much, much more than that. Was everything that Harold had tried to do now gone? Was Aura nothing more than a memory? Had her fight with Kite and the others against the Wave been a waste?

No, she realized, and with that realization, she came to understand part of the reason why she felt so uneasy at this turn of events. What would have happened to those in a coma if something like this had happened during the quest to stop the Wave? Would Fumikazu ever have…?

She shook her head, trying to get off that line of thought. Everything had turned out all right in the end, the Wave had been stopped and everyone in a coma had woken up, so there was no need for her to worry about that. She wasn't even sure why she really cared about this turn of events. So what if the servers were destroyed? It wasn't as if she had played the game for fun, right? She never would have started playing The World in the first place if Fumikazu hadn't fallen into a coma. So it was gone now. Big deal. Her job was over; it didn't matter anymore.

Yet she did care. Though she had started out playing The World to find out the cause of Fumikazu's collapse, once everything had been fixed, she found she actually enjoyed playing with the friends she had made for fun. While she had met some of these people in the real world, others she still only knew over a game server.

As for Fumikazu, Akira knew he would be upset to find out that his accomplished Wavemaster, Kazu, was now nothing more than a memory. She had a feeling that though he would be upset at the loss, that he would still be happy for the fond memories he had left. Her little brother was tough like that.

And what about BlackRose? Though she hated to admit it, she had become quite fond of her character. BlackRose had been everything she couldn't be in real life, named for the girl in her dreams who had helped her find the strength to fight. It was hard to believe she would never see her again.

Coverage of the fire was soon replaced by other, less important news, and Akira raised her arm to click the television off by remote. She couldn't sit here all night dwelling on it; she still had homework to do. Standing, she made her way upstairs to her room. As she pulled her textbooks from her backpack, her eyes fell on her computer.

Maybe… Just maybe, there had been some sort of backup system?

Putting the textbooks down, she sat at down in front of her terminal. Lifting the FMD, she slid it over her eyes, moved the mouse over the icon that linked to The World and double clicked.

All that came back at her was an error message stating that a link to the server was not possible. Sighing, she removed the FMD and set it gently on the desk beside her. It had been worth a try, though she hadn't been expecting much.

She debated sending Kite an e-mail, but decided against it. She would wait to see what developed first. Leaving the computer, she went back to her homework. It wasn't much, and once she was finished, she headed to bed, though she still couldn't shake the strange feeling of emptiness that had settled inside her.

X X X

The sky was dark, her surroundings coloured in a bloody red light from the moon. Dried and faded, dead rose petals littered the ground, crackling beneath her feet as she struggled to move her sluggish body.

The figure of a girl stood, silhouetted in the dim red light atop a hill in the distance. Though little of her could be seen, it was clear from the way she held herself that she was a warrior, though wounded.

She kept moving forward though the bedding of dead petals. She had to reach the warrior; she had to talk to her. Despite her slow movements, she was soon close enough to see details of the warrior girl. Her hair, blown by the wind, hung ragged. Her clothes, a silk evening dress of a black darker than anything she had known before, had been ripped, torn until it barely covered her body. Blood ran freely from the many wounds covering her body.

Reaching out a hand, she placed it on the warrior girl's shoulder, but this time, there wasn't even a breath of wind to stir the bed of dead rose petals. The girl turned, and she could see the trails of red left from the tears of blood the girl had been crying. The warrior fixed her with a somber expression, shaking her head as though apologizing for something, though what, she wasn't sure.

With a sudden scream, the warrior girl's skin began to bubble, and almost immediately, her form was consumed by flame…

X X X

Akira woke with a start from the horrible dream. She didn't want it to be true, but she knew why she had had the dream. BlackRose was gone, nothing more now than ashes, a digital memory. She couldn't help feeling that when her character had died; a part of her had gone with her. It would explain the strange emptiness she had been feeling since hearing of the fire.

She tried to tell herself that BlackRose was nothing more than just a character, data in a game, no more than a string of 1's and 0's, but it did little to comfort her. Unable to stop herself, she started to cry, though not for the lost character data. She cried for the part of her she had lost when that character had died, for the ties that had been severed and for everyone else who felt the same as her. She continued to cry until she slipped back into a dreamless sleep.

**The End**


End file.
